Last night, I had a very vivid vision.
I’m honestly not sure if it was a dream or a memory.
I just know that for a short, sweet moment in time, I was transported back to my childhood Halloweens.
I wanted to attempt to share the memory through writing.
You pour the candy you received on your small tour through the neighborhood with your mother, into the bag your costume came in. You think about leaving it in your smaller pail, but there’s no telling where the night may go. You don’t want to have to quit early because you ran out of room!
Your aunt is taking you out tonight, and, at this moment in time, she’s the only person in the world that you can possibly imagine loving Halloween as much as you do. She got you into this holiday, coaxing you out from under a table when you were four years old, dressed as a pumpkin but scared to trick or treat. From then on, Halloween was always somewhere in your thoughts. You bundled up in winter, wishing you were putting on a costume instead. You watched the leaves bloom in spring, only to anticipate them changing color in the fall. You searched every corner of every store you visited in summer, trying to find any sign of Halloween, or at least the autumn season. The countdown was always on.
After what seems like years, and a million costume checks, your aunt comes to pick you up. You proudly show her your costume, gather your pails, double-check that you haven’t forgotten the flashlight, and you’re off.
She drives you to McDonald’s, which has become tradition. Happy Meals in treat pails, or with characters in costume on the side, become your Halloween menu. On the ride there, you look around. There is magic in the air. Decorations you’ve been riding past for a month, suddenly seem alive tonight. The sun is setting, in a way you’re sure you’ve seen before, and know you will again, but tonight it’s different. Tonight it’s pure magic. Tomorrow you can look at the sunset, and try to get this feeling back, but it won’t quite be the same. You try to block out any and all thoughts of the night ending, but there is a bittersweetness to the arrival of Halloween night that you’ve never been able to deny, despite waiting for it all year long.
McDonald’s is like one big party on Halloween night. It’s so fun to see everyone’s costumes. Some kids from your class are there, and at first you don’t recognize a couple of them. You look at the costumed adults and see your future. You’ll never stop celebrating. You’ve known that since your first real Halloween night.
Dinner is over, and so the fun begins. Your aunt drives to a nearby cluster of houses, behind a ball field just down the road from you. You grab your pail, that beloved gift from your grandfather that you get so many compliments on every year, and you’re off!
“Trick or treat!” “Trick or treat!” The words roll off your tongue and echo all around you. It’s almost a sensory overload. Your pail begins to fill. Candy, bags of chips, even coupons for treats from fast food restaurants. Some tiny paper bags filled with a plethora of things, that you hope don’t include spiders, because at this point in time, you‘re still terrified of them. So much so you even have to have your aunt ring the doorbell at one house, because there’s a plastic one hanging there.
The decorations are plentiful. Orange lights are everywhere, providing an eerie glow that feels otherworldly. A couple of houses have turned into home haunts. They’re intimidating, but you happily pass through, enjoying the scare when someone starts rising out of a pile of leaves, and hook-handed man waves from the back of a truck in the driveway. There’s a house with so many carved pumpkins on its doorstep, you wonder how the family that lives there ever found the time or energy to carve them all. On one corner, there is a lamp that’s been converted into a witch flying across the moon. That witch has always been there, since you were four. You’ve come to think of her as an old friend that you get to visit once a year, and wonder what stories of Halloweens past she would tell you, if she could.
There is toilet paper hanging from almost every tree. The sheets look like ghosts when the wind hits them just right. You think to yourself, if something happened to your costume, there are enough that you could use them as mummy wrappings, if you needed to. You take a deep breath and smell the air. You can never really describe the smell, only that it just simply smells like Halloween. It’s a mixture of the cool air, burning leaves, pumpkins, candy...and always, some type of magic.
You go on your way, skipping houses that are too dark or not really decorated. You wonder to yourself why anyone would not want to participate in Halloween. Even at a young age, it’s such a foreign idea to you. Halloween has become such a part of who you are, not having it would feel like the equivalent of not living at all!
You’re back where you started from too soon. You get back in the car, check the time, and are grateful to drive around a little more. You grab the smaller pail, shaped like the head of a smiling black cat, and visit a few more streets. Some people seem flabbergasted that your pail is so empty, as if they think you’re so amateur that you’d only be starting out at this hour! If they only knew about the full pail in the car!
Soon, lights start to turn off. There is less and less activity in the streets, and you know it’s about time to go home. You glumly say what you’ve been saying every year since you were four: “I can’t believe it’s over.”, to which your aunt gives her standard response, “We’ll be doing this again before you know it.” You want to believe it, so badly, but it feels like a lifetime away at this moment.
As you pull back onto your street, and slowly walk up to your own door, the final one of the night, you feel like you’re coming back through a portal. As if you’ve visited your home world, and now are being catapulted back into a different one, forced to stay for another year. You take one last look up at the moon before trying to fool your parents into thinking you’re just another trick-or-treater, the final thrill of the evening, and whisper:
“Good-bye.”
No one understands the tears in your eyes in that moment, but they’ll dry again next year.
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